Brave new world or great performance?

It is a rejig aimed at dragging the federal government’s middle-aged arts body into the 21st century, a brave new world of loose and shifting collaborations in which distinctions between art forms and genres matter less and less.

The Australia Council review, published yesterday, was mandated by Federal Arts Minister
Simon Crean
late last year to consult widely as part of an up-close look at the purpose and continuing relevance of a body conceived by Nugget Coombs and founded by Gough Whitlam in 1973.

Indeed, it’s a reassessment rotten with Labor party associations, taking place as it does against the backdrop of Simon Crean’s proposed National Cultural Policy.

Should that document– and accompanying extra-funding purse – ever see the light of day, it would be the first such statement since Paul Keating’s Creative Nation in 1994, when Mr Crean, like his father 21 years before him, was in Cabinet. As Mr Crean told The Australian Financial Review last November, the cultural policy is all about “Labor reclaiming the brand . . . it’s part of the Labor narrative that we’ve . . . let slip."

Federal Arts Minister Simon Crean
AFR

While finding that the Council had served Australia well and should remain the country’s primary arts-funding body, the review’s chairman and chairwoman, Angus James and Gabrielle Trainor, found its “rigid" structures needed to be recalibrated to meet more fluid and collaborative times.

The review recommends the abolition of art-form boards assessing grants in favour of larger, more inclusive and diverse panels of experts, or juries, based on the Canadian model, together with the opening of previously quarantined funding for the country’s 28 major companies –which include the flagship national and state opera, theatre and dance companies and orchestras, and which together account for $98 million of the Council’s $186 million annual budget – to the same sort of peer review to which other applicants have traditionally been subjected.

It is anything but clear how that would work, and whether it would mean that companies safely ensconced in the Council’s major performing arts board since the 1999 Coalition-mandated Nugent inquiry, which was announced to shore up their then-haemorrhaging fortunes, might lose their perches.

Given that those 28 companies are all, too, subject to complex state and federal government funding agreements, any changes are unlikely to come any time soon.

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But if the recommendations are accepted, as Mr Crean broadly hinted they might be yesterday – subject to whatever “constructive inputs" might result from their release –they will do much to combat criticism of the Council in some quarters as any combination of rigid, elitest, outdated or out of touch.

Whether the recommended $21.5 million Council funding boost materialises in surplus-seeking times remains to be seen, but part of the purpose of that money is to mitigate concentration of funds among big companies.

The focus on “matched" or “partnership" funding, by which federal funding would be further leveraged with state and private money, the latter via a merged Australia Business Arts Foundation/Arts Support body tucked under the council’s wing, also seems inevitable in an era of fiscal restraint and burgeoning philanthropy. It’s also already happening overseas.

One of the council’s most vocal critics, Renew Australia director Marcus Westbury yesterday welcomed the review. “I think making the major performing arts companies more competitive is a good thing, but the review doesn’t hint whether there’s any capacity for companies beyond that group to access that funding as a result," Mr Westbury said. As for the abolition of the “silo" arts boards, “I think it’s inevitable," he said, “but it’s got consequences: people who do well out of the current system will be concerned."

Interestingly, the review also recommends what many see as a much-needed clarification of the division of labour between the council and the government’s Office of the Arts, recommending the former focuses on grants, excellence and advocacy; and the latter, policy and “everything else", as Mr Westbury puts it.

“While that’s probably been the case by default, it puts a huge responsibilty on [the Office}, and one of the key questions of the cultural policy process is whether it’s properly resourced, because at the moment, the Office for the Arts is a bit of a black hole."